In sterile patient care areas such as an operating room, a medical lab, or a procedural room, personnel typically wear surgical scrubs and caps. According to national regulatory guidelines, properly laundered scrubs should be worn when a person enters a sterile department and removed before leaving. Compliance to this protocol in and out of the operating room may be important in reducing cross contamination and healthcare-associated infections.
These regulatory guidelines may not only be applicable to hospital personnel, but also to sales representatives or vendors that enter an operating room to witness procedures and sell medical devices and implants. Typically, the hospital provides the sales representatives or vendors with scrubs at the hospital's own expense. However, the monitoring and tracking of the daily inventory of these scrubs can be difficult and expensive. Scrubs may be consistently lost resulting in further expense to the hospital.
Due to issues with inventory control, sales representatives or vendors may find it increasingly difficult to find a full set of scrubs in an appropriate size at any one hospital. As a result, it is not uncommon for a sales representative to continue wearing the same set of surgical scrubs throughout the day while visiting different hospitals.
Scrub dispensing devices have been developed to control the inventory and distribution of scrubs in a medical facility. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,638,985 to Fitzgerald et. al, discloses a vending machine for dispensing articles, such as scrub garments, that has multiple rows of slots that can store the scrubs. The rows are vertically stacked with a separate lockable door on each level and between each slot so that only a single slot may be accessible. Additionally, U.S. Pat. No. 6,223,934 to Shoenfeld, discloses a scrub dispenser cabinet for dispensing differently sized garment tops and bottoms to customers. A user is able select a preferred size scrub which is then dispensed via a system of wheels and belts. Also related to scrub dispensing, U.S. Pat. No. 7,474,938 to Poliner discloses an interactive automated article dispensing device that also includes a user credit tracking system for tracking a number of articles a user is authorized to have dispensed.
Unfortunately, these systems may not reduce the likelihood of the dispensed scrub from being worn by a user over a long period of time in different hospitals and operating rooms. Thus, further improvements may be desirable.